Badly fragmented, highly mineralized, chemically altered, or contextually ambiguous remains can tell us much less than well-preserved specimens in clear stratigraphic contexts.

And of those analyzable specimens, only a subset — those with surviving DNA in accessible bone tissue, particularly the petrous bone — can be genomically studied.

The result is that our sample of genomically characterizable individuals from the earliest phase of modern human presence in Europe is tiny — perhaps a few dozen specimens in total, spanning thousands of years and thousands of kilometers of geography.

Each one is precious.